


But Every Sun Doesn't Rise

by everyperfectsummer



Category: October Daye Series - Seanan McGuire, Sherlock (TV)
Genre: 5+1 Things, F/M, Fairies
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-14
Updated: 2017-04-14
Packaged: 2018-10-18 22:51:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,040
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10626798
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/everyperfectsummer/pseuds/everyperfectsummer
Summary: Alternatively titled: Five Lies Molly Hooper Told (And One She Didn't Have To)





	

**Author's Note:**

> moving this over from ffnet after polishing it up a little, so if you recognize it, that's where it's from.

  1. **One she told Sherlock**



It’d been less than two days. Sherlock had decided - or maybe Mycroft had ordered him, she wasn’t really sure -  to spend a few days laying low in her flat before moving on to do whatever it was dead consulting detectives did.

 

In his first few days of house arrest, he’d insulted her wardrobe, her intelligence, and her flat; started and abandoned multiple experiments using what was in the kitchen; and proceeded to make increasingly more unflattering deductions about her based on her possessions, before suddenly falling silent to stare intently at her cat.

 

They say there’s nothing like living with someone to knock the shine of a crush. Her crush on Sherlock, having already withstood years of outright rudeness alternating between overt manipulation, had probably inherited more of her mother’s immortality than she had. However, there was no infatuation strong enough to keep Sherlock’s infantile behavior from driving her insane. She was edging towards the kitchen to try and salvage something edible that he hadn’t contaminated when he broke the silence. “An uncle or a cousin.”

 

“What?”

 

“The person Toby is named for, of course.”

 

She froze. He took her silence as an indication that, as always, he needs to make his meaning more obvious than he already thinks it is, rather than an emotional reaction. “You mentioned once that you chose Toby’s name yourself. Given the arrangement of your flat – photographs all over the furniture, and clearly the only items you clean on a regular basis. The entire living room is arranged to accommodate a table you clearly don’t use but still value, a gift then, and given its poor quality and lack of use, prized because of the giver rather than the gift itself. There are similar examples in every room of your flat.” He waved an arm expansively.

 

“You put a premium on sentiment and emotional value in everything else in your life; the name of your cat would be no different. It wasn’t chosen randomly, it meant something to you. You chose his name because you associate the name ‘Toby’ with a treasured memory or a feeling, much like those photographs. Not a friend – if you cared enough about him to name a pet for him, you would have mentioned him long before now. You felt the need to introduce your boyfriend from IT after only three dates; a male friend would have been introduced as well, or at least talked about. No, it’s someone that you think of rarely but still care for. Not a friend, then, but family. Your father’s name was Henry, you have no siblings, so it’s not a brother, which leaves an uncle or a cousin. Which is it?”

 

“I - neither. It - just popped into my head, and seemed to fit, that’s all.” She gave him a shaky smile, and escaped into the kitchen.

* * *

**2) One she told herself**

 

Sherlock’s improved with age, she’d thought. With John. With the introduction of consequences.

 

All combined, really. He’s less arrogant. Kinder. Until what he’d done to Janine - she didn’t think he understood, not really, exactly how horrible of a thing that was to do to someone.

 

Or worse, what if he had understood, and done it anyway?

 

Her dates with Moriarty had been brief, but they’d burnt out a sense of trust in people that she hadn’t thought she’d even had left. And that wasn’t even touching Devin.

 

Everyone had had a thing with Devin at some point, all of them little broken children in love with a broken Peter Pan. Devin, other kids at the home, Moriarty - they’d all pretended to care because she had something they needed, and moved on once they’d gotten it. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me over and over and over again, and it continued to hurt, breaking parts of her heart that she’d thought had been shattered entirely years ago. Janine had just had the wrong job at the wrong time, and made the mistake of trusting Sherlock. And it _hurt._ Every time she thought that Sherlock had been knocked off of the pedestal she’d created for him, she discovered that there was still part of it left, holding him up. He was a man, not a hero, she knew that, she _knew_ that, but she always expected better of him than he could possibly be. But she knew better now, after Janine, after the drugs, she did, really. _He’s not my hero anymore_ , she told herself, and almost believed it.

* * *

 

**3) One she told Sherlock**

 

Everyone knows that she was attracted to Sherlock from the first time she met him, and they all assume the same things; that she was attracted to him because he was fit and intelligent, for the traits people notice within a second of meeting him, for the traits she mentions on her blog for the world to see.

 

They’re partially correct; his looks and intelligence are certainly attractive, she’ll freely admit that, but what grabbed her attention and held it, even though she knew, she _knew_ that he was human through and through, that he might have heard of the tradition but certainly didn’t believe in it, that there was no way that he was motivated out of a fear of accidentally declaring himself in her debt…the first time they met in her morgue, even though convention and  silent pressure from every policeman in the room dictated he do so, he didn’t tell her ‘thank you’.

 

He was strange and brilliant and didn’t quite fit in with humans, didn’t quite understand how to and pretended he didn’t care, _and he went out of his way to not say thank you_. And part of her heart, the part that still urged her to put down wards, and hated dawn, and that she liked to forget existed, lit up.

 

Being mixed-race means experiencing a certain amount of culture shock everywhere you go, being an outsider wherever you are. Despite her Choice, she’s more human than not, and voluntarily lives in a flat instead of a knowe. She’s adapted, she’s adapting, will be adapting all her days.

 

But she grew up on the border between the fae and mortal worlds and it’s called Home for a reason, and if Ash or Luke or any of them had lived to grow up they might’ve acted just like him.

 

Despite years of living as close to human as a changeling could, and the mountains of social embarrassment she’d had to incur to avoid ever voicing such as common phrase, she’d never said thank you to anyone. It took countless favors and multiple years and, finally, faking his death, before Sherlock did.

 

“What was today about?”

 

“Saying thank you,” he said, and her world shattered.

 

“For what?” she managed to say.

 

“Everything you did for me.”

 

Hearing that everything she’d done had somehow mattered enough for him to try and show that he had appreciated it made her happy, of course it did. And she’d known all along that he was human, that she was doing what Sherlock once John against. She hadn’t turned him into a hero, but she’d still tried to shove him into a role that didn’t quite fit, tried to use Sherlock as a link to Faerie while knowing just how human he was.

 

She did love Sherlock (a _nd wasn’t that a terrible thing to know, when she was engaged to someone else_ ), not for his uncanny resemblance to the changelings that had once been her family, but for who he was, all of his genius and ineptitude and capacity for kindness and humanity. She was sure of that.

 

But the tiny part of her heart that still urged her to put down wards, and hated dawn, and that she liked to forget existed -- when he stood on the stairs and told her that that day had been a thank you -- that tiny part broke, just a little.

 

“It’s okay,” she told him, as though her world wasn’t broken irreparably,  “It was my pleasure.”

* * *

**4) One Sherlock came up with**

 

“Eliminate the impossible, and whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”

 

Eliminate the impossible. That’s always been the flaw with Sherlock’s deductions - he leaps to conclusions based on the information he has, inside the parameters of what he considers to be possible, and his realm of possible will always be limited.

 

Not just because he’s ignorant of actual secrets, such as the fact that some people can be in two places at once, or get halfway across the country in a few minutes, but because of open truths he misinterprets, or has never observed.

 

Sherlock made mistakes in his deductions all the time - the gender of John’s sibling, Sally’s mother’s illness, and Moriarty in general, just for starters - but sooner or later, people corrected him. People tend to reveal more about themselves than he’d already done, as though it would undo the damage their self esteems had incurred at having their secrets revealed to the world.

 

That was a key part of Sherlock’s strategy, although whether he did it on purpose or not she’d never been sure. He laid people bare in the most unflattering terms possible, and their egos led them to try and defend themselves, telling him more than he could’ve learned through deduction alone.

 

Of course, that didn't work on those whose egos had already been trodden through to the ground, or those whose secrets were far enough beyond the boundary of “impossible” to be safe from Sherlock Holmes. Molly fell into both categories, and strongly suspected that she was not alone.  Maybe she didn’t have enough pride to try and repair it. Or maybe it helped that she knew that all of her secrets that mattered were safe from him.

 

With each new deduction he was dead right and grievously wrong by turns, and her views on it turned as well. Some days she wanted to shove lists in face of everything he’d ever said about her that’d been wrong, complete with footnotes and timestamps. Others, she was incredibly grateful for how much easier it made lying.

 

Sherlock’s first deduction about Molly Hooper had only been half right, and he’d gotten worse from there, building deductions on top of deductions into towering castles, not knowing that half the foundations were rotted through. Some of his deductions haunted their relationship more than others.

* * *

 

A rustling and the room plunged into darkness and she startled awake, gasping, someone was in her apartment and messing with her curtains - oh. Sherlock. He was staying with her. Right. And apparently trying to force her to sleep in the dark. “You could at least make an effort at improving your already deplorable living conditions.”

 

“...what?”

 

“Your sleep schedule is disturbed by the shifts you work, and sleeping with the windows open during the day further disrupts your natural sleep cycles. Your melatonin production is designed to go to bed shortly after night falls, and awake shortly after dawn. Instead you insist on the opposite, and the effects are detrimental not  just to your sleep but to your health and mental state. You are a more than adequate pathologist but can hardly hope to remain so if you insist on disrupting your own health.”

 

She sighed, in need of approximately three hours of sleep in order to figure out how to handle the situation better. “Sherlock, please...open the curtains.”

 

“Molly, for a variety of reasons -”

 

“I’m a pathologist, I know about melatonin and sleep cycles and don’t care, I sleep better with the sun, just open the curtains and let me _sleep,_ Sherlock.” He didn’t move. She huffed, rolled over, and attempted to block out the darkness with her blanket, before she realized why that wouldn’t work and lowered the blanket again. She fumbled for the lamp on the bedside table, flicked it on, and fell back asleep with Sherlock still standing in front of her.

 

Three hours later she woke up to find the light flicked off and the curtains back open. He must have done that after she’d fallen asleep. Just like every good thing he did, as though good deeds are best done unnoticed.  She shuffled out of the room, still half asleep, and caught sight of Sherlock staring meaningfully at her. “Um. Good morning?”

 

“Nyctophobia.”

 

“I- what?”

 

“You’re afraid of the dark. Unusual in a woman your age, but for someone with your high levels of social anxiety and work related stress, along with low levels of exercise and adequate social interaction, high anxiety is to be expected, and anxiety can be known to manifest itself in the form of a phobia.”

 

“Sherlock, that’s - I exercise!” _Great_ , she thought, _you couldn’t have protested the fact that he thinks you’re over thirty and scared of the dark._

 

“Intermittently, but your irregular work hours prevent you from forming exercise habits. There is no need to embarrassed about it - I’m sure that if you tackled your stress levels, your nyctophobia will subside as well without direct intervention.” He seemed pleased, as though he was solving a problem rather than mislabeling one. She could still taste the words _I’m not scared of the dark, just nocturnal_ on her tongue but she thought better of it. If he was going to explain her odd behavior away for her, why not go along with his explanation? “This is none of you business,” she deliberately avoided denying his assumption, “and I’d thank you to leave it - and the light - alone."

 

**5) One she didn't know she was telling.**

 

She waited awkwardly on the street across from Toby’s house, waiting for her to come home so that she wouldn’t have to make excuses to speak in a room without Cliff. She’d already been catcalled, had a person kindly ask if she was lost, and was getting _seriously concerned_ that Cliff was going to notice the creepy teenager standing outside his home when she got poked in the shoulder from behind. She yelped and turned, finding Toby standing behind her with a half amused, half exasperated expression.

 

“Stalk much?”

 

“I - I’m not -”

 

“I’m guessing you heard what I said to Devin.”

 

“We all heard what you said to Devin. People in _Angels_ heard what you said to Devin. You left a whole new layer of scars on the paint when you threw that lamp at him.”

 

Toby half smiled, before darkening again. “So, are you here to congratulate me for yelling at him, or to try and make his point for him?”

 

Molly bit her lip, before blurting out her rehearsed speech. "It's not going to work, Toby. She's going to have to Chose eventually. I’m not saying this because I’m picking Devin over you or something, I’m saying this as a friend. I’m worried about you and about her, too. You know I care about her."

 

Toby, whose face’d been getting steadily angrier, softened slightly at that. “Toby - just - be careful. It’s going to end badly, and I don’t want it to end any worse then it has to.”

 

Toby smiled, a little bitterly. "Guess we'll see about that in thirteen years, won't we?"

 

“I’ll be at Devin’s. When you go yell at him, I’ll be there to help you, however it turns out. Ok?”

* * *

 

Gillian’s thirteenth birthday came, and Toby swam back and forth, with no idea what day it was, or even that she had a daughter. Cliff and Gillian celebrated alone, as they’d gotten used to doing, while Molly sat in the yard behind the house, don’t-look-here firmly in place, having flown from England just in case she’d turned out to be right after all, and was both relieved and guilty when midnight came and nothing had happened.

 

Devin sat alone in his office, thinking about the woman who had promised to be there. He told all the kids not to disturb him, because he was waiting for someone.

 

She never showed up.

 

**& 1) A truth that sounded like a lie**

People talked about the Changeling’s Choice as an event, as though once a changeling Chose, it was over and done with. It wasn’t. It was a lifestyle; it was something every changeling did, every hour of every day, whether they acknowledged it or not. Every action, every decision, every word that came out of their mouths could tilt one way or the other, be human or fae.

 

_Are you like your mother, or like your father?_

 

It was in the decision to get clothes from the mall or from the garden, to pay with money or with toadstools and leaves. It was in whether you lived in a knowe or in a house or at Home. It was every decision they ever made, but it was theirs.

 

Once upon a time, Molly had looked at her mother and said “You, you, I choose you.” Years later, she chose again, and kept choosing every day of her life.

* * *

 

She was in the grocery store, judging various cat food prices, when her peripheral vision filled with a very familiar stranger who shouldn’t have been even on the same continent. Molly reached forward, touched her arm, “What are you - oh. Oh! Sorry.” she withdrew her grip just as suddenly as the arm she was holding tensed.

 

“Excuse me?” Gillian stepped backwards, _from that crazy stranger who just grabbed her_ , Molly thought bitterly, _oak and ash, I am a stranger._

 

Molly smiled, hoping it was less brittle than she felt. “I’m so sorry, I thought you were someone - I just - you look a lot like someone I knew.” She raised her hands reassuringly. “Sorry.”

 

Gillian smiled back, pleasant and polite and completely devoid of familiarity. “Don’t worry about it, I’ve done that before.”

 

Molly of Home looked at her smile and saw nights growing up with Toby flipping into days babysitting her Gilly-baby, saw laughter in an alley and picnics in the backyard, saw Wendy’s little girl all grown up standing next to her, both of them farther from Neverland than she or Devin or Toby or any of them would ever have guessed, and Molly Hooper smiled at the stranger she’d met in the market, grabbed a tin of cat food, and kept smiling as she walked away.


End file.
